Designer Meats: Making Your Own At Home

Photos by Mike Tremoulet

A fresh slab of Mike's home-cured bacon.

​In this week's feature, "Designer Meats", we take a look at Houston chefs who are curing and hanging their own meat in-house. And while you may not have Chris Shepherd's space to hang your own Virginia ham or Justin Bayse's expertise to create your own soppressata, there are some charcuterie items that you can make at home.

I spoke with Mike Tremoulet, a local food blogger who's been making basics at home -- such as duck confit, rilletes and bacon -- for nearly nine months. Having tasted his amazing rilletes and bacon, I wanted to know what inspired him to start crafting his own meats at home and, moreso, how I could do it myself.

Eating Our Words: How did you first get interested in curing meats?

Mike Tremoulet: I'm a big fan of technique-based cooking: learn to do techniques correctly and well, and not only will following recipes be easier, but improvising gets that much more straightforward.

Mike's bacon after frying up in the pan.

​Curing meats is an ancient technique that is being lost in the modern convenience-driven kitchen. What amounts to minimal effort -- coat a pork belly with salt, leave it for a week, then smoke it -- gave way to commercial packaged bacon, which gave way to already-cooked-for-you commercial packaged bacon, with a hideous detour into Bac-O's along the way.

Being able to cure meats is a connection with an ancient cooking method and technique and gets back to the roots of the food we eat. Pulling along food history is important to me, less for a sense of authenticity and more for knowing that good food -- truly good food -- is born out of two things: first, invention in times of scarcity (e.g. all the wonderful things we can do with offal, or the whole idea of braising and using tougher, cheaper cuts of meat to make great food), and second, obsessive drive for perfection (e.g. Escoffier). I can break away from mainstream, mass-produced, everything-is-the-same food and get back to something pure by learning these ancient tricks.

That also doesn't take into account the quality angle, or the control over what I eat. Perhaps it's my chemistry and chemical engineering background, but I'm not as bothered by the list of chemical names that appear in many foods. (It helps that I can pronounce all of them.) Modern food on a mass-production scale requires this sort of alchemy, like using ascorbic and citric acid in place of a vat of lemon juice. Also, this is becoming a trite and almost religious argument, and loses some of its effectiveness, having been played out so. many. times. I will say that the quality of what I make is head and shoulders above supermarket brands, not to mention the pride at having done it from scratch myself.

EOW: What was the first recipe you tried?

Tremoulet: It all began with duck confit. This was stuff that had only existed for me in cookbooks and on the Internet, something magical and delicious and very French but that I hadn't come across -- even in international travel for my job.

The first Christmas after I got married, my wife found me a used copy of The New Making of a Cook by Madeleine Kamman. In here was a wealth of cooking skills, really my first foray into cooking techniques as opposed to recipes. I still haven't read through all of it yet, but there on the page, staring back at me, was a recipe for duck confit. In exacting detail. Suddenly, this culinary feat was achievable.

Eventually, I did buy and thaw a duck, seared the duck breast for salad, and confited the legs using a tub of amazingly expensive duck fat procured when a friend was shopping in Central Market and called me. The duck breast was good and the confited legs eventually were tasty, even if I did mangle them a bit reheating the legs trying to crisp the skin. Much milder than I expected.

I remember the first time I actually ate professionally prepared duck confit: warm, on a bed of mashed potatoes, I think, at Chez Georges. Dinner with my Dutch boss on a business trip. Suddenly it all made sense. It was comfort food on a cold night, and I now had a standard to aspire to, something more than words on a page. I've since had it once more, in the cassoulet at Feast (divine), and I have a pair of duck legs maturing in the refrigerator now, that were put in at the start of the year.

Confit is a gateway drug. Somewhere early on, in reading about preserving meats, I came across Polcyn and Ruhlman's Charcuterie, shortly after it was released. It's been on my Amazon wishlist ever since, but on reading excerpts from the book and associated forums where the authors really gave a lot of extra information, I had put it out of my mind as impractical fantasy. Curing meats, especially hanging them to dry, depends on a cool environment with stable humidity. Houston is really anything but that. Lacking the resources or handy skills to go create a drying chamber out of old refrigerators or the like, I dismissed curing meats as something left to artisans and avid cooks in more accommodating climates.